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About Bob Feingold

Bob is a seasoned technology and project management executive. As an Air Force Officer (Colonel) from 1965 through 1991, he served in a number of executive leadership, computer system development, and program management roles. After retirement, he joined Robbins-Gioia, Inc. as a Regional Vice President and Program Management Consultant. He then moved to state government, where he held numerous influential positions, culminating in his service as Chief Information Officer for the State of Colorado under Governor Bill Owens. Bob has a doctorate degree in Operations Research and an MBA from Indiana University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami.

OnePager 5.1, as we’ve mentioned in previous posts, includes new multi-page capabilities.

We’ve added the flexibility to control (1) whether the legend is inside or outside the graph area, (2) whether the legend is fixed at one of these 8 predetermined points or a predetermined distance from them and finally, (3) whether the legend appears on one or more or all pages.

First, let’s take a look at the updated Legend tab of the Project View Properties form. Each of the updated areas are called out below.

The legend position section of the tab allows you to select if you want your legend in a predetermined spot or “dock” and the radio buttons control which dock you have chosen. There are four additional legend positioning options in the dropdown, as shown and explained below:

1. Anchored to page – Place the legend at a distance from a fixed reference points (one of the eight predetermined positions and maintain this distance on all pages where the legend is displayed.

2. Docked to page – Place the legend at one of eight predetermined positions along the edges of the page.

3. Docked to graph – Place the legend at one of eight predetermined positions along the edges of the graph. The “graph” is the space that contains all the tasks and milestones, excluding row labels, swimlane labels, time axis annotations, margins, headers, footers, and title.

4. Free Floating – Without using any of the predetermined positions, use drag and drop to place the legend at an arbitrary location with respect to the graph or page.

We can picture the page as a harbor and the graph as an island in the harbor and the total of 16 predetermined positions as 16 places to park your boat as shown in the illustration below:

To make it more clear, we will use a sample project views, however, we will go in a different order of explanation this time for the sake of simplicity.

1) Docked to page: The example “Print Preview” below of a 2 X 2 configuration the legend in the upper right corner of each page in the project view where the right margin is made larger for illustrative purposes:

In the “Print Preview” of the four page document with the “Docked to page” option, the legend remains in the upper right corner of the page on all four pages. The legend itself does not change dimensions.

2) Docked to graph: The example for “Docked to graph” a 2 X 2 “Print Preview” below that places the legend in the upper right corner of the (blue) graph area on all four page project view:

3) Free-floating: The “Free-floating” option is the ultimate in flexibility but may provide for inconsistent results with multi-page outputs. As mentioned above, this option is without any docking or anchoring at all and depends on where you place the legend manually. As an example let’s take a 2 X 2 project view as shown below:

Notice how the legend moves around in the right margin from page to page. It doesn’t remain where you intended it to be except on page 2 above. This is because OnePager is trying to keep the legend in a position relative to the two page breaks that define each page, while also keeping the legend on the page.

4) Anchored to page: The “Anchored to page” option when compared to the “Free-floating” option discussed just above will provide better results in the multi-page situation described above because the anchoring forces the legend center to maintain the same displacement from a reference location on every page.

To show an example, let’s create a 2 X 2 page project view with the margins expanded and the legend positioning option set to the “Anchored to page” option.

Above we see that all four pages of the document have the legend positioned consistently in the same relative position. Subsequent movement of the legend in the Normal or Page Break view modes will correspondingly reposition the legend on each of the multiple pages.

Finally, it is important to note that anchoring achieves page-to-page consistency for non-margin locations too. However, being in a page-consistent location within each page is no guarantee that the legend does not obscure some tasks and milestones on some of the pages. In practice, margin locations for the legend are the safe bet for consistent legend positioning in multi-page.

Further down in the Legend tab is the Show legend on section which has two options as shown here:

There are two radio buttons. The first, All pages will ensure that the legend will appear on all pages in the report.

When the Pages radio button is selected, you have the option of telling OnePager which pages should show the legend.

This article will show you how to make fine adjustments using the Page Layout tab of the Project View Properties form in OnePager 5.1.

After you’ve created a multi-page project view and perhaps looked at it in Print PreviewMode (Page Layout tab), you may want to make detailed changes to certain aspects of your new multi-page document. This can be done from the OnePager project view editor by going to the Home tab and clicking on the Project-View Properties button. Once open, you can navigate to the Page Layout tab per the illustration below:

The Page Layout tab above has a complete set of controls similar to what you would expect to see when getting your document ready to print.

Let’s take a look at the project view based upon the current settings above. This is how it would look in Print Preview mode:

As you can see, the project view above will correspond to the settings in the Project View Properties Page Layout tab. Now suppose we want to change this to a three by one (3 X 1) page configuration, repeat the time axis on each page, and place the legend on page 1. The necessary changes Page Layout tab are circled below:

And when the three changes shown in the red ovals above are applied, the project view will look like this in Print Preview View mode:

The Project View Properties dialog box is there in the project view editor to give you those fine levels of control you need to create the desired Gantt Chart that meets your schedule communication objectives.

For more detailed information on these controls and others, please consult the OnePager User’s Guide which is available at the Chronicle Graphics website or accessible from the Help menu of the OnePager application itself.

OnePager has always been able to support output of pages of various sizes. Version 5.1 of OnePager makes selection of your page size easier with the Page Layout tab on the ribbon:

OnePager 5.1 automatically gets your list of available page sizes from Windows and provides them in the convenient dropdown. Simply click on the Page Size button and select your page size.

When you are ready to print your project view you have two options for accessing a Print Preview: on the Page Layout tab, or by selecting the Print option from the File tab. Within the File tab, you have another opportunity to change the page size by clicking on the Settings button:

At this point you may make changes within the Project View Properties form’s Page Layout tab, or simply accept the Page Layout settings by clicking OK, and then click the Print key above to produce a printed copy of your project view.

OnePager handles all the scaling and positioning of the project view on the page. Look for more blog posts in this space on how to configure the time axes, rows and swimlanes, titles, headers, and footers on multiple pages, a single page, or selected pages.

OnePager Pro and Express have several elements such as the title, time axes, rows and swimlanes, headers and footers, and the legend, which can be repeated across multiple pages in your report.

On the OnePager Page Layout tab, there is a section called Repeating Elements, which contains five of these options:

When you turn these boxes on or off, you can control whether these elements appear on all pages, or just the first page. With all these boxes checked, all of the elements will appear on all of the pages in the multi-page project view as shown below:

If you uncheck the title, rows/swimlanes, and time axis boxes, the four pages will look like this:

Repeating the legend is a more complex option and is configurable under Home->Project View Properties->Legend.

OnePager Pro and Express 5.1 were designed to support large program reports across multiple pages. While the controls and methods for using multi-page features are presented elsewhere in this blog series, we want to show you here how you can improve your project view editing skills with the Freeze Panes feature.

Take the project view below as an example of a project with many tasks:

Many people choose to zoom into a single swimlane for easier editing::

Unfortunately, this view is missing (1) the time axis as the top and (2) the swimlanes on the left, which means we have to keep scrolling back and forth while editing to see where we are. The Freeze Panes feature is the answer to this problem.

The controls for the Freeze Panes feature are on the Page Layout tab. There are several options to select from as shown here:

Suppose we choose to Freeze rows and swimlane labels. What this does is assures that the row and swimlane labels always appear on your screen, no matter where you scroll and how far zoomed in you are:

If we turn on the Freeze top time axis option, then the time axis will appear, no matter where we scroll:

The Freeze Panes feature has no impact on how the project view will appear when copied to PowerPoint or printed. The feature is simply there to make editing easier.

OnePager Pro and Express 5.1, as we mentioned elsewhere, support your need to insert, move, and remove page breaks in your project reports. OnePager also lets you specify the number of horizontal and vertical pages in your document. In this mode, OnePager will take the number of pages you specify and place the horizontal and vertical page breaks for you.

To illustrate this, look at the single-page project view below and the Page Layout tab:

Now, suppose you want to configure the project view above into four pages: two horizontal and two vertical. To do this, just make the changes to the Document Fitting section of the Page Layout tab by selecting 2 pages for the Width and Height as shown below:

When these two selections are complete, the project view will look like this in Page Break View mode:

As you can see from the Width and the Height dropdowns, you have many choices including an “Automatic” choice where OnePager will examine the project view and will suggest an appropriate number of pages for you.

For example, for project views that have a lot of tasks extended over a relatively short time frame, selecting the “1 X Automatic” combination for Width and Height is a good way to set up a long (vertically) but narrow (horizontally) multi-page project view like the one below shown in Print Preview Mode:

The new multi-page feature in OnePager Pro and Express 5.1 gives you tremendous flexibility with your project reporting.

In a previous blog post, we talked about adding and removing page breaks. In this post, we’ll illustrate how to manually move page breaks to fine-tune the pagination of your report.

To move the vertical page break, just hover your mouse over the page break. It will automatically change to a double arrow. Clicking and dragging will allow you to move the page break left and right:

When you release the mouse button the page break will be established in its new position and the previous vertical page break position will disappear.

When you look at the project view using the Print Preview mode, the four pages will look like this:

At this point you may want to make further adjustments to the page breaks, remove them, or add additional page breaks. You have a great deal of flexibility to configure the pages in ways that meet your presentation needs.

In a previous blog post, we showed how OnePager Pro and Express 5.1 can prepare multi-page project views. In this blog post, we are going to show how you can add and remove page breaks to a project view to suit you specific needs.

First off, the controls for adding and removing page breaks can be found on the Page Layout tab in the in the Page Setup section as shown below:

Selecting this button causes a drop down menu to appear as shown below:

You may insert a manual vertical or horizontal page break at any time. The two Remove all page break options are only active when there are page breaks available to remove.

Clicking the Insert vertical page break option gives you a cursor that will drop a horizontal page break between any two rows. This is shown below:

Once the vertical page break is positioned, the project view will look like this when viewed in the OnePager 5.1 Page Break View mode:

The exact same process can be used for inserting horizontal page breaks. Repeating the process allows you to insert as many page breaks as needed.

Removing page breaks requires the selection of one of the two Remove all page break options shown in the illustration above.

When you create a multi-page project view with OnePager Pro or Express 5.1, the pages are numbered just like they are numbered in Microsoft Excel. That is, from top to bottom, left to right. So in a four page project view, page number one would be in the upper left and page four would be in the lower right.

To illustrate this, below is a four page project view displayed using the OnePager 5.1 Page Break View feature:

To see what the individual pages will look like when printed or individually copied to another document, go to the OnePager 5.1 Page Layout tab and click the Print Preview button:

OnePager 5.1 will then show you what the pages will look like as shown below in this Print Preview screen:

OnePager Pro 5.1 prepares your project view the way you need it in the number of pages that are required for your presentation or document. You have all the controls necessary to see where page breaks will be automatically inserted by OnePager 5.1 and what the output will look when presented to your audience.